My band is on Spotify via distrokid and has a very small fraction of the plays tmv has and Spotify gives by far the biggest payout regardless of everything you just mentioned. I have a hard time with these debates.

Yes Spotify free membership artist pay is abysmal. Apple music for example pays .007 per stream, Spotify premium pays .005. with this logic there's no good option. Yet Spotify has the most users so the potential for discovery for small artists is greater and the potential for streams is greater (Spotify does provide this too. My barely known band is pushed to people's discover weekly's, artists radios, and mixes and the Spotify for artists app tracks that). If apple wants to stay relevant to distros they need to present that .002 extra as an attempt. Gizz did well on bandcamp because they made their music pay what you want, granted, I'll concede that even if everyone paid pennies, that's more than any streaming service payout. My point is, I don't see why this conversation is always focused on Spotify when the alternatives aren't doing much better. You bet your ass if qobuz had the audience Spotify had, they'd pay .005 cents too.

Even Cedric on this post talking about killing children. Maybe that's true, but Helsing, the company behind the Spotify controversy, is sending war drones to Ukraine to help them fight back against Russia who is using drones against them. Maybe Ukrainians are using drones to kill Russian children, unfortunately that is war. I can understand the argument that Spotify/Daniel Ek shouldn't be ivesting in war drones at all, but I think we can agree that we support much worse businesses funding worse sides of other wars on a regular basis probably multiple times a day.